Toronto Union Station (1873)

Toronto’s second Union Station was a passenger rail station located west of York Street at Station Street, south of Front Street in downtown Toronto. It was built by the Grand Trunk Railway (GTR) and opened in 1873, replacing the GTR's first Union Station, located at the same location.

The Grand Trunk Railway (GTR) built its first station in Toronto in 1858 at a location just west of the present Union Station train shed. The station consisted of three wooden structures and was initially shared with the Northern Railway of Canada and the Great Western Railway, although both railways soon built their own stations along the Toronto waterfront.

By the 1870s, Toronto’s economy and population were booming and the old station was no longer adequate. The Grand Trunk built a new Union Station on the same site that opened on July 1, 1873. At the time it was the largest and most opulent railway station in Canada and was designed in the Italianate/Second Empire style by architect Thomas Seaton Scott, who later designed Grand Trunk’s Bonaventure Station in Montreal. The builder was John Shedden & Co. and the Chief Engineer was the GTR’s E. P. Hannaford. The main entrance and façade faced the harbour rather than the city, underscoring the continued importance of boat travel on Lake Ontario. As the Grand Trunk absorbed several smaller railways serving Toronto, passenger trains were increasingly consolidated at Union Station. The arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1884 soon strained the facility beyond its limits, with its three-track train shed handling over sixty trains a day.

In 1892, the railways agreed to expand the station through an extensive rebuilding program and Edmund Wragge was appointed the project’s Chief Engineer. A new three-track train shed was built on the south side of the 1873 station. The most distinctive feature of the redevelopment was a new seven-story office building on Front Street, built of red brick and Credit Valley stone. This was designed in the Romanesque style by the Toronto architectural firm of Strickland & Symons. The building’s façade closely resembled the Bradford Gilbert-designed Illinois Central Station in Chicago that had opened in 1893. An arcade over Station Street connected the new and old sections of the station. Toronto’s new Union Station officially opened to the public on January 1, 1896, although the station had remained in constant use throughout the rebuilding.

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